Typical graphics rendering systems utilize a geotypical texture database, wherein geotypical textures are stored in memory and utilized to fill in textures for every occurrence of a particular texture, for example a cornfield. The geotypical cornfield texture is held in memory and used repeatedly on every polygon that represents a small section of the cornfield. Typically, there are many corn field texture polygons requiring the geotypical cornfield texture to be used thousands of times in a scene containing cornfields. Thus, such a geotypical database would use a large number of polygons to represent the surface of the earth.
Real time rendering requires that each polygon undergo a mathematical transformation, a matrix multiplication within each display frame to map each polygon from world coordinates to display coordinates. Typical graphics rendering systems have limited processing power to render a large number of polygons in real time, thus the presence of the polygons slows down system performance during real time rendering. Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus that reduces the number of polygons that must be processed in real time rendering.
Current rendering systems can display large geospecific images, however, resolution of those graphics rendering systems is limited to the resolution of the source imagery. Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus that enables enhancement of rendered imagery beyond the resolution of the source imagery.
There is also a shortage of high-resolution imagery data coverage worldwide. In many cases only low-resolution imagery is available and in some cases no imagery is available. Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus that enables the creation of real time scenery in areas where there is no source imagery available.